Elazar Ben-Yoets

Elazar Benyoëtz is an Israeli writer. He was born in Wiener Neustadt to a family of Austrian Jews. In 1939, the family emigrated to Israel, where he grew up speaking the Hebrew language. His first volume of poetry was published in 1957, and Benyoëtz has lived as a freelance writer ever since. In 1959, he was ordained as a rabbi in Jerusalem. In 1963, he came to Berlin as part of the Ford Foundation's "Artists in Residence" program, and in 1965, together with Renate Heuer, he founded the Bibliographia Judaica, to date the largest encyclopedia on German-Jewish writers. He has lived in Israel again since 1969. He is married to Renée Koppel, an Algerian-Israeli calligrapher and miniaturist who specialised in Judaica.